“Early school leaving” and student retention is a challenge amongst educational institutions across Europe. Students who have dropped out of school struggle with lower employment rates and lower participation in adult education for the rest of their lives. This means, that there is lasting and possible devastating effect on the individual pathways in life of early school leaving. Traditionally the approach to student retention has been reactive; when the student has been missing classes for some period of time, the school initiates a plan for “bringing the student back”. What this project consortium proposes is to change this approach from reactive to proactive: Developing a structured way of using data proactively could make it possible to help a given student – maybe even before he or she realizes that they need help. By creating methods described in a Guidebook and developing the Onboarding & Student Retention-app (O&SR-app) that both “onboards” the students to the given educational environment and creates a possible predicative retention approach to guidance counseling by having the students themselves easily indicate how they experience going to school, we could help a lot more students before they drop out, instead of trying to bring them back. The objective of the project is therefore to use data proactively to combat the considerable challenge of early school leaving. The O&SR-project will be carried out by six consortium partners: Fønix (Norway), a provider of HR services and career guidance counseling for adults; North East Scotland College (Scotland), a college which works with digital tools and education; TAKK (Finland), an adult educational institution; Manzavision (France), a digital product developer; Center for Ungdomsforskning (CeFU) (Denmark), a research center located at Aalborg University that specializes in youth, youth culture and youth well-being and VUC Storstrøm (Denmark), an adult educational institution. The Guidebook and the O&SR-app will be developed by testing on approximately 400 students, 24 guidance counselors, 40 teachers and 4 managers at four different European schools. It is expected that as a result of the project innovations the student drop-out rate will be reduced by 10% to 20% in the early school leaving risk group. This could potentially have a widespread regional, national and European impact at educational institution level, but it could also contribute vastly to individual student schooling experience and thereby foster social inclusion.
The use of big data to combat the considerable challenge of early school leaving. It is expected that as a result of the project innovations the student drop-out rate will be reduced by 10% to 20% in the early school leaving risk group. This could potentially have a widespread regional, national, and European impact at educational institution level, but it could also contribute vastly to individual student schooling experience and thereby foster social inclusion. At Fønix, TAKK & VUC, the objective of the project was to develop new and innovative retention methods to address and decrease the dropout rate and to improve the process of student onboarding at the beginning of their studies. NESCol’s goal was to take learning about student retention from the project and use of the App and of course, learning from the partners on the project to make an impact on student retention outcomes. Manzalab wanted to match their technological assets with actual users’ needs and expectations, by combining inputs from teachers and the opportunity to reach actual students for testing purposes. CeFU wanted to follow the process of implementing the app in the partner schools and see the potential effect on retention and participation in education.
“Early school leaving” and student retention is a challenge amongst educational institutions across Europe. Traditionally, the approach to student retention has been reactive; when the student has been missing classes for some period of time, the school initiates a plan for “bringing the student back”. Sometimes it will work sometimes it will not. What this project consortium proposes is to change this approach from reactive to proactive: Developing a structured way of using (big) data could make it possible to help a given student – maybe even before he or she realizes that they need help. With the O&SR project and the development of the app, the project consortium proposes a new digital tool and an innovative practice to help address the "early school leaving" or drop-out rate of students. All partners experience a lot of work has been and is being done in order to improve both onboarding, retention and the well-being of students. With the developing of a new digital tool with a new proactive approach to onboarding and retention, it could provide us with useful data to the improvement of the students’ well-being and their study lives.